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Canada’s big screen solitudes
Thursday March 05th 2015Call it the Quebec hallucination.
During the Canadian Screen Awards on Sunday, whether you were enjoying the show live at the Four Seasons Centre or catching it an hour later on CBC’s main network, you could feel a francophone ghost hovering over the hoopla of the anglophone Toronto showbiz scene.
Having merged what used to be the Gemini Awards for TV and the Genie Awards for movies, the Screen Awards give prizes for both, but there’s a fascinating distinction. For TV, all the nominees and winners are for English-language shows, whereas French-language productions compete with English-language for movies.
The event is inevitably and overwhelmingly Toronto-centric, drawing hordes of insiders from our happily thriving TV industry, which has lots of reasons to celebrate.
On the movie side, the story is very different. Mommy swept up the major prizes with good reason. The talent of director Xavier Dolan and his actors — Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon and Suzanne Clément — is explosive, overwhelming, thrilling and unforgettable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to this triumph. The winning members of the Mommy team seemed like strangers in an alien environment. Maybe that’s because their real family is in Montreal, where Quebec filmmakers have their own groups and awards.
And the path for Mommy along the film awards circuit has been decidedly weird. At Cannes last spring, Mommy created a sensation and was awarded the festival’s Jury Prize. More recently it was a winner in Paris, taking the César (or French Oscar) for Best Foreign Film.
For three decades, the foreign-language category has provided Canada’s best shot at the Oscars. But this year Mommy was conspicuously absent from the list of five nominees. And most of the Canadians nominated in other Oscar categories were being honoured for work they did on U.S. productions.
A few days before the Oscar ceremony, I attended a dinner at the elegant official residence of Canada’s consul-general in Los Angeles, James Villeneuve. Each table was named after a Canadian movie director and I was seated at the Xavier Dolan table. But Dolan was not present, nor were the stars of Mommy. The following night, they were also absent from Canada’s Stars, a stylish party boosting our screen talent at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles in Beverly Hills.
That event was largely orchestrated and funded by Telefilm Canada, the federal government’s film funding agency for productions in both official languages and on screens small and large.
It was in Los Angeles, on a large screen in a large space with a distressing number of empty seats, that I caught up with Mommy. The experience was both exciting, because of the talent, and distressing, because of the demonstration that the movie was tanking, despite the hopes of the specialty film distributor that picked it up at Cannes of success at the U.S. box office.
Even now, when Jean-Marc Vallée, a hot director from Quebec, makes his mark via Hollywood hits such as Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, Canada still depends on French-language features from Quebec to give our movie industry credibility at home and abroad.
The reason is that while thriving on the small-screen side of the industry, we’re thin on the big screen side. Consequently we have created the fiction that Canada has one happily bilingual movie culture blessed by Telefilm.
If that were the case, everyone in Toronto would have been buzzing about Mommy long before Sunday’s awards show.
The reality, sadly, is that even 44 years after audiences in English Canada embraced Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine, what we have on the big screen remains largely a chronic case of two solitudes.
Source: Toronto Star
Headline, Industry News
Canada’s big screen solitudes
Thursday March 05th 2015Call it the Quebec hallucination.
During the Canadian Screen Awards on Sunday, whether you were enjoying the show live at the Four Seasons Centre or catching it an hour later on CBC’s main network, you could feel a francophone ghost hovering over the hoopla of the anglophone Toronto showbiz scene.
Having merged what used to be the Gemini Awards for TV and the Genie Awards for movies, the Screen Awards give prizes for both, but there’s a fascinating distinction. For TV, all the nominees and winners are for English-language shows, whereas French-language productions compete with English-language for movies.
The event is inevitably and overwhelmingly Toronto-centric, drawing hordes of insiders from our happily thriving TV industry, which has lots of reasons to celebrate.
On the movie side, the story is very different. Mommy swept up the major prizes with good reason. The talent of director Xavier Dolan and his actors — Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon and Suzanne Clément — is explosive, overwhelming, thrilling and unforgettable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to this triumph. The winning members of the Mommy team seemed like strangers in an alien environment. Maybe that’s because their real family is in Montreal, where Quebec filmmakers have their own groups and awards.
And the path for Mommy along the film awards circuit has been decidedly weird. At Cannes last spring, Mommy created a sensation and was awarded the festival’s Jury Prize. More recently it was a winner in Paris, taking the César (or French Oscar) for Best Foreign Film.
For three decades, the foreign-language category has provided Canada’s best shot at the Oscars. But this year Mommy was conspicuously absent from the list of five nominees. And most of the Canadians nominated in other Oscar categories were being honoured for work they did on U.S. productions.
A few days before the Oscar ceremony, I attended a dinner at the elegant official residence of Canada’s consul-general in Los Angeles, James Villeneuve. Each table was named after a Canadian movie director and I was seated at the Xavier Dolan table. But Dolan was not present, nor were the stars of Mommy. The following night, they were also absent from Canada’s Stars, a stylish party boosting our screen talent at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles in Beverly Hills.
That event was largely orchestrated and funded by Telefilm Canada, the federal government’s film funding agency for productions in both official languages and on screens small and large.
It was in Los Angeles, on a large screen in a large space with a distressing number of empty seats, that I caught up with Mommy. The experience was both exciting, because of the talent, and distressing, because of the demonstration that the movie was tanking, despite the hopes of the specialty film distributor that picked it up at Cannes of success at the U.S. box office.
Even now, when Jean-Marc Vallée, a hot director from Quebec, makes his mark via Hollywood hits such as Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, Canada still depends on French-language features from Quebec to give our movie industry credibility at home and abroad.
The reason is that while thriving on the small-screen side of the industry, we’re thin on the big screen side. Consequently we have created the fiction that Canada has one happily bilingual movie culture blessed by Telefilm.
If that were the case, everyone in Toronto would have been buzzing about Mommy long before Sunday’s awards show.
The reality, sadly, is that even 44 years after audiences in English Canada embraced Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine, what we have on the big screen remains largely a chronic case of two solitudes.
Source: Toronto Star
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Headline, Industry News
Canada’s big screen solitudes
Thursday March 05th 2015Call it the Quebec hallucination.
During the Canadian Screen Awards on Sunday, whether you were enjoying the show live at the Four Seasons Centre or catching it an hour later on CBC’s main network, you could feel a francophone ghost hovering over the hoopla of the anglophone Toronto showbiz scene.
Having merged what used to be the Gemini Awards for TV and the Genie Awards for movies, the Screen Awards give prizes for both, but there’s a fascinating distinction. For TV, all the nominees and winners are for English-language shows, whereas French-language productions compete with English-language for movies.
The event is inevitably and overwhelmingly Toronto-centric, drawing hordes of insiders from our happily thriving TV industry, which has lots of reasons to celebrate.
On the movie side, the story is very different. Mommy swept up the major prizes with good reason. The talent of director Xavier Dolan and his actors — Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon and Suzanne Clément — is explosive, overwhelming, thrilling and unforgettable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to this triumph. The winning members of the Mommy team seemed like strangers in an alien environment. Maybe that’s because their real family is in Montreal, where Quebec filmmakers have their own groups and awards.
And the path for Mommy along the film awards circuit has been decidedly weird. At Cannes last spring, Mommy created a sensation and was awarded the festival’s Jury Prize. More recently it was a winner in Paris, taking the César (or French Oscar) for Best Foreign Film.
For three decades, the foreign-language category has provided Canada’s best shot at the Oscars. But this year Mommy was conspicuously absent from the list of five nominees. And most of the Canadians nominated in other Oscar categories were being honoured for work they did on U.S. productions.
A few days before the Oscar ceremony, I attended a dinner at the elegant official residence of Canada’s consul-general in Los Angeles, James Villeneuve. Each table was named after a Canadian movie director and I was seated at the Xavier Dolan table. But Dolan was not present, nor were the stars of Mommy. The following night, they were also absent from Canada’s Stars, a stylish party boosting our screen talent at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles in Beverly Hills.
That event was largely orchestrated and funded by Telefilm Canada, the federal government’s film funding agency for productions in both official languages and on screens small and large.
It was in Los Angeles, on a large screen in a large space with a distressing number of empty seats, that I caught up with Mommy. The experience was both exciting, because of the talent, and distressing, because of the demonstration that the movie was tanking, despite the hopes of the specialty film distributor that picked it up at Cannes of success at the U.S. box office.
Even now, when Jean-Marc Vallée, a hot director from Quebec, makes his mark via Hollywood hits such as Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, Canada still depends on French-language features from Quebec to give our movie industry credibility at home and abroad.
The reason is that while thriving on the small-screen side of the industry, we’re thin on the big screen side. Consequently we have created the fiction that Canada has one happily bilingual movie culture blessed by Telefilm.
If that were the case, everyone in Toronto would have been buzzing about Mommy long before Sunday’s awards show.
The reality, sadly, is that even 44 years after audiences in English Canada embraced Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine, what we have on the big screen remains largely a chronic case of two solitudes.
Source: Toronto Star
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